I think the “Tools for going from the basic special forms into a full Lisp” are usually called “standard library”. Most if not all Lisps have them, and usually the standard libraries are written in Lisp, i.e. in the (simpler) Lisp that is implemented by the core.

I don’t think there are any “bring your own bootstrap” Lisp implementations that you will be able to use 100% unchanged. Since different Lisps will have different sets of basic special forms/ promitives the various standard libraries are not drop-in interchangeable, but there’s a lot of overlap. E.g. the function list-length of my own Lisp is almost identical to the code from CLtL2.

I’d say write your own standard library for your Lisp, taking inspiration from others such as Lisp500 or maybe even my own Lisp’s default library.

Or skip the “write your own Lisp” part and integrate one of the embeddable Lisps into your platform.

I started with the infos from https://github.com/elahtrebor/RLWRAP-SBCL-LISP-COMPLETIONS and ended up with

alias jm='rlwrap -C jm -i -q'\''"'\'' -b '\''\(\)'\'' -f /mnt/c/robert/jmurmel/murmel.completions -f /mnt/c/robert/jmurmel/mlib.completions java -ea -jar /mnt/c/robert/jmurmel/lambda/target/jmurmel.jar --libdir /mnt/c/robert/jmurmel/samples.mlib'

for running my own Lisp on debian (actually Windows10/wsl/debian). If I enter (remove and hit TAB three times then rlwrap will show me remove and remove-if so maybe that’ll help you.

At least with abcl you may want to consider using the builtin compiler for a considerable speedup, don’t know about the others:

C:\>abcl
CL-USER(1): (defun fib (x) (if (< x 2) 1 (+ (fib (- x 2)) (fib (- x 1)))))
FIB
CL-USER(2): (time (fib 39))
86.97 seconds real time
0 cons cells
102334155
CL-USER(3): (compile 'fib)
FIB
NIL
NIL
CL-USER(4): (time (fib 39))
8.958 seconds real time
0 cons cells
102334155
CL-USER(5):

How many times do you calculate Fibonacci

I you don’t memoize - everytime!

I’ll see myself out…